QUICK SHOPPING
Vocabulary Virtuoso
Vocabulary is something many students glean from literature and their various subjects, but once a child really gets writing, a parent/teacher may notice words being repeated or bland variety. This is a time to supplement your language arts to help grow a child's vocabulary. These supplemental workbooks from The Critical Thinking Co. each have 15 lessons. Elementary has 10 words per lesson, while the Middle School version has 12. This may not seem like a lot, but the goal here is retention and application. You don't want so many words that kids quickly forget half of them. Each lesson has the same format, starting with a word list showing the part of speech, pronunciation, another word in the same family (abolish/abolition), a simple definition and several synonyms. You could go a step further and have a student make an index card for each word. The first exercise has sentences where you choose the correct word of 3 to fill in the blank. The next has a word bank/box at the top of the page and you choose words to fill the blanks in several sentences. Then comes a story with blanks and a word bank at the top. The next exercise gets tricky with a word scramble to match a word in a sentence. There are still 2 more exercises for that same word list: a matching the word/idiom/phrase with the vocabulary words and finally one where the student is completely writing a definition from memory. This last exercise could be used as a quiz if you desire. All answers are in the back. 172 perforated pages, SC. ~ Ruth
